Spreadsheet Selves
Hinternet Summer School Projects | Simon Ezra-Jackson
Simon Ezra-Jackson is a student of history at the University of St. Andrews, and a freelance journalist.
Don’t forget to tune into the Hinternet livestream later today, 20:30 Paris / 19:30 London / 14:30 NY / 11:30 Rio Linda. Lawrence Weschler and JSR will be discussing Paleolithic art, the moon, and other things that make us human.
Introduction
At some point between 9:30 and 11:00 CEST, on 9 October, 2025, I presented my talk, “Against The Gutenberg Parenthesis”, a critique of CUNY Professor Emeritus Jeff Jarvis’ 2022 monograph “The Gutenberg Parenthesis”. As I paced the carpeted floor of the Sala De Juntas, second floor of the Facultad de Educación, Filosofía y Antropología of the University of the Basque Country, my purpose to puncture Jarvis’s techno-boosterist balloon. You see, his book purports that we have arrived at the end of the era of the printed word, the Gutenberg Parenthesis, which, Danish scholar Lars Ole Sauerberg argues, began with the printing press and ended with the internet.
Jarvis’s book does not mourn the print era. In fact, he traces the history of all those who railed against the corrupting influence of print, including several popes, and links them to the “moral panic[s]” of Nokia-toting naysayers today.1 He is keen on the new age of the Digital, and continues to argue that it democratises the public sphere.
I am not so keen.
Like the stereotypical Boomer, I do not like what the stereotypical kids are doing. Except, in a non-stereotypical way, I am actually a kid myself, not only in spirit, but quite literally I, Simon Ezra-Jackson, am well within the age cohort known as Generation Z. I’m halfway through my undergrad. In fact, I think people in my generation, who grew up online, are far more suspicious of flashy chatbots than our parents’ generation. I will level this charge against Jarvis, whose response and/or proposals for collaboration I would gladly welcome.
Jarvis’s problem, I argued in the carpeted Sala de Juntas, during my presentation at the UNESCO-sponsored XVI International Ontology Congress earlier this October, is not that he’s wrong — but only that he’s a Boomer. You see, part of Jarvis’s argument is that the first adopters of any major technological shift in knowledge-production are honorary Boomers (like me). Take Gutenberg himself. Even if he came tolling the death knell of the manuscript tradition, Gutenberg himself remained mentally stuck in the “scribes’ age” — he himself, in his own lifetime, could not see the revolutionary potential of his medium, and he only used his printing press to imitate the format of the manuscripts he grew up with and killed off. It would take future generations, growing up having only ever known moveable type, properly to use the new technology to its full advantage (and, perhaps, properly to see its flaws). Jarvis points to the modern novel; it took a century and a half after the press’s invention, he notes, for Cervantes to produce a masterpiece of human creative power naturally suited to this already not-so-new technology.2
Put simply, Jarvis’s optimistic thesis is that we, living in an age where the dominant form of communication is no longer print but online media, should be glad about the end of the print age. His main reason for this optimism is that he believes the decentralised digital age is more democratic than the era of press barons and papal censors. No longer are the means of mass communication controlled by moneyed interests, he (earnestly) argues — with social media, those from marginalised backgrounds can make their voices heard; others can collaborate on modern versions of the “Renaissance library”, such as Wikipedia, while yet more, he argues, can use the emerging potential of short video platforms to create collaborative works of art like Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical.
All of these things do indeed exist online. I didn’t mind Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical. But I worry Jarvis himself is just like Gutenberg. Both are men who came of age on the old, dead medium, unable fully to understand the hellhound they have helped unleash.3 Jarvis thinks the internet today is the same as the internet he grew up on, the benign web of hobby blogs and forums of the 1980s that only started dying in the aughts, when I was born. His internet does not exist any more, not in any meaningful proportion. The new internet is that of Sora 2, of Meta Search Assistants. Most crucially, it is not even text-based; as Derek Thompson writes, over ninety per cent of time spent on Instagram is spent watching videos. Facebook is nearly as bad.
This doomerism is known well by the founding editor of The Hinternet. In his 2022 book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Justin Smith-Ruiu bemoans the illibereral quality of the attention-strangling churn of the net.4 The kids aren’t on Wikipedia. They’re not making Ratatouille crossovers nor discussing liberation theology.5 They’re watching an AI-generated catgirl do a Fortnite dance, and then they’re watching a pixelated fish rotate to the sound of trending audio, then they’re watching Peter Griffin explain the thought of Julius Evola.6
In the introduction to his book, Jarvis happily preempts this entire critique by acknowledging his age might make his argument overly rosy. I do not blame Jarvis for failing to grasp this. How could he?
In my talk I discuss the work of many thinkers whose work helps us understand the digital age: Jarvis, Smith-Ruiu, James Marriott,7 Frances Yates, Walter Ong. But, in all honesty,I only know one writer who properly appreciated the destructive potential of the internet age. I cannot reveal their name, for they are a person whose name I do not know. I came across their work on a message forum I now am unable to find. It has since been taken down. After I know not how many nights sifting around with the Wayback Machine, I have finally found a partial version of their work, which I attach in PDF format below. At one point, it seems, the article was posted on the website of The Economist, with an interactive tool attached. The archived version lacks the interactive tool that was apparently a vital feature of the live article.
Perhaps some bold reader of this newsletter will try to rebuild the interactive tool. I humbly request they abstain. Perhaps it is for the best that the interactive tool should remain unusable.
LINK TO PDF HERE:
Jarvis pursues several tangents about those in power who also swiftly embraced print as a tool for their own ends, including Henry VIII, who commissioned one of the first printed Hebrew Talmuds, in the hope of seeing whether conversion to Judaism might let him more easily divorce his wife.
This trend of honorary boomerism is eternal — early filmmakers imitated the theatre; a certain breed of video-game designer is still obsessed with the word “cinematic”; and, in my mind, a generation of real boomers who grew up at the tail end of the print ages still cannot see the existential dangers posed by the technologies of the digital age.
Yes, both of them. I will happily explain to anyone who is interested in listening why I believe the printing press was just as great a mistake as Sora 2. For a more eloquent argument than I could ever offer, I would recommend Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory (1966).
Like Jarvis, Smith-Ruiu has a soft spot for the Old Internet. At one point in his 2022 book, he waxes rhapsodic about a “sublime” Wikipedia rabbit-hole he went down, on milk.
Some are, of course. Some are, I assume, reading Hegel in the original. But not enough to matter.
I’m sure I will be oblivious as to the true nature of the horrors Gen Alpha grow up consuming.
I would especially recommend James Marriott’s essay,“The Dawn Of The Post-Literate Society”, in which the author mourns the “rational, dispassionate print-based liberal democratic order”.
And don’t forget the Livestream with Lawrence Weschler and JSR later today!
It's heartening to know that there are people in the world thinking along these lines, thinking perhaps not simply in terms of the tools or innovations that we produce but their impact upon human beings and the species as a whole. The Economist article, if it is to be accepted as accurate, would be troubling if it weren't so believable. We think of ourselves as conscious beings but are not as conscious as we think we are. We think our consciousness makes us superior to the rest of the world's lifeforms while not even being conscious enough to recognize that we're not as conscious as we think! (Dunning-Kruger anyone?)
It is my contention that the inner world of human conscious still remains relatively unexplored, though it is easily exploited on its surface level from the outside. But there is a depth to human consciousness that can only be explored by an individual in relative silence and calm, an increasingly fragile proposition, especially for those--as per the Economist article--who are simply trying to get through the day (an aspect of human existence that, frankly, has almost surely existed since our earliest times in one form or another). When it comes to power, there is an incentive NOT to give people time enough to think for themselves. But power is its own distraction, because as with all the things that give us our dopamine hits, power is ultimately as hollow and unsatisfying as anything else.
Anyhoo, illuminating work, Simon! I thank you for it.